Obtaining an install tape

You have two choices now, either you can create your own, or you can download a pre-made tape on sourceforge. If you want to build your own tape image, then follow the next section.

Building your own tape image

I will describe what is needed, and how to create your own Quasijarus tape image, that is suitable for installing with SIMH.

Requirements

You will need the following materials to put together a 4.3 BSD Quasijarus installation:

A working perl interpeter to make the tape images.

A copy of gzip.

A working C compiler.

A compiled binary of vax from SIMH, along with the ka655x.bin again from SIMH.

You will need the following files from any 4 BSD archive from the Quasijarus0c directory. I have used the files from Sourceforge. You you will have to use a web browser to download them, to deal with the sourceforge download system. But that's the price of free hosting.

gzcompat

Next it's easier on a host machine to convert the downloaded Quasijarus files into gzip, then uncompress them using gzip. For this you will need the gzcompat program. I've included the sourcecode on the link, as it's getting harder to find.. Simply compile the gzcompat.c into an exe. It should be somewhat straightforward. The original location for gzcompat is [here] and a known good copy is [here].

On most instances with gcc simply run:

gcc gzcompat.c -o gzcompat

And that should be it.

Preparing for installation

With the files downloaded you will need to uncompress them all and then create the tape file. With the different compression this will be somewhat involved.

The following command will decompress the tape files, on a UNIX install. For Windows users, use the type command, instead of cat.

Now we have our tape and disk, so we are ready to proceed with the install. For those wondering, unlike the 11/780 emulator, the MicrovaxII can run it's microcode in a logical fashion and we are able to boot from tape in this release.

Boot 1.

I disable as many of the devices as possible to get a 'clean' install. So this is the install.ini that I'm going to use.

Once the BIOS has done it's POST, it will prompt what device to boot off of at the >>> prompt. The first tape device is mua0:. Once the tape has done the first boot you'll be greeted with the = prompt. From here we are going to load the copy program. Simply type in the following:

copy
tms(0,1)
ra(0,1)

This will copy the second file onto tape, onto the second file position on our hard disk. The output should be the following:

Booting the emulator

Now boot up the emulator with the boot.ini The first time we boot up in this configuration the emulator will prompt for what device will be the default device. If you typo this, you will have to delete the nvram.dat file, and try again. The default device will be dua0: which is the primary rq disk.

First Multiuser Boot

Now we can just re-run the last command, and we should boot multiuser! By default there is no root password. Also the system will run fsck uppon boot, so depending on your host computer this could take a while.